Please Stop With the City Connect Nonsense

I can't take it anymore. We are sitting idly by as Nike attempts to turn MLB into the NBA and someone has to take a stand.

We've had another batch of City Connect uniforms unveiled this week and this simply has to stop. The Marlins' uniform is actually better than their first City Connect iteration, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's good. And then we have the White Sox dressing up as another team from a different sport. I totally understand why they would want people to associate them with anything other than the horrific brand of baseball they've displayed for years, but this is just ridiculous.

The best you can hope for out of a City Connect uniform is something like the Braves', where it's just not offensive. But even if your team is lucky enough to have one of the "good" ones, that uniform is taking up one of the five spots teams are allotted, so in Atlanta's case, the new-age take on its 1970s throwback uniform is taking the place of that actual uniform — which was infinitely better.

Kevin D. Liles/Atlanta Braves. Getty Images.

Todd Kirkland. Getty Images.

That's not to even mention some of the City Connect variants where you turn on a game and wouldn't even be able to tell who was playing if there wasn't a score bug on the screen. We could soon see a green vs. black and red matchup between the Rockies and White Sox — God bless anyone who watches that game, both for the horrendous uniforms and the worse baseball. And all that is on top of the fact that what was originally an idea to have uniforms representing something unique about their cities has just morphed into Nike trying to sell more jerseys with whatever wacky concepts they can conjure up next. The Astros' new City Connect uniform this year just says "Stros" on it. I'm pretty sure they could have come up with that one on their own.

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I understand that MLB feels the need to have 11-year-olds get interested in baseball rather than Minecraft, but there was nothing wrong with the uniforms we had for 100 years and people still watched. You get a home white, a road grey, a dark top to wear with each of those pants and a throwback uniform that honors your team's history. Please leave the NBA mash-up concept uniforms on the drawing board.